A Tale of Two Testers

David Tacelli, president and CEO of Xcerra, was excited. His company’s reception for customers (and the press) at the Trou Normand restaurant in San Francisco’s hip South of Market neighborhood was going very well. Gourmet salames and other tasty foods were on offer, along with fine wines and craft ales and beers.

He gleefully pointed out to editors that the product to be introduced at the reception was behind a chair in a corner of the restaurant’s elegant patio. After a brief time, the product was brought out. It was the ultra-compact DxV tester from Xcerra’s LTX-Credence Tester Group. The basic test system weighs an average of less than 50 pounds, making it suitable to work next to a desk, in a test applications lab, or on a production test floor. It is essentially a five-slot version of the company’s Diamond tester, with a PCI Express (PCIe) architecture.

Tacelli described it as “an Intel-based PC with a tester.” The DxV holds an embedded high-performance Linux controller to run Xcerra’s Unison test environment and related tools. It was said that the tiny tester was suited for IoT and sensor device testing, among other applications.

This blog post is actually about more than two testers.

Advantest touted the testing of IoT sensors, embedded controllers, and mixed-signal devices in its booth with the V93000 Wave Scale platform at its SEMICON West booth. The V93000 comes with the existing Wave Scale RF channel card and the new Wave Scale MX-HR card for testing high-resolution converters and IoT devices.

The company featured its T2000 platform for advanced device and module testing, which can address automotive chips and microcontrollers, offering a lower cost of test.

Advantest’s T5800 platform can provide wafer-level testing of mixed memories, such as DRAMs, NAND flash memories, and nonvolatile memories, according to Jin Yokoyama, functional manager in the memory/storage marketing and business development department of Advantest’s Marketing and Business Development Division, Sales Group. The new T5822 memory tester can also provide final test and wafer sort, he said.

Advantest also exhibited its EVA100 system for evaluating and measuring analog, digital, and mixed-signal devices. The booth, in addition, had information about the company’s system-level test and nanotechnology offerings.

In total, this blog post was about four testers. Today’s automatic test equipment market calls for a variety of systems to deal with the semiconductor industry’s widening selection of chips.